SELF-CONTROL,POLITICAL IDEOLOGY,AND MISBEHAVIOR: UNPACKING THE EFFECTS OF CONSERVATIVE IDENTITY

Survey data collected from a southwestern metropolitan area indicate that self-defined politically conservative individuals are less inclined to commit criminal or deviant acts than their liberal or moderate counterparts; however, results from multivariate analyses indicate that measures of self-control and pressure to conform all reduce the effects of political conservatism to nonsignificance. In general, the relationship between political ideology and misbehavior appears to be partly spurious and partly indirectly attributable to the effects of other social and situational factors. Moreover, responsiveness to pressures to conform is not due to self-control. The results provide some challenge to traditional interpretations of misbehavior but they also confirm an important part played by structural/contextual variables.     

Random Drug Testing and Religion*

Research recently has begun to examine the link between religion and social control. It has been noted that religion, in particular Protestant conservatism, does play a role in shaping public opinion, and as a result, public policy on crime, crime control, and justice. The present research examines the issue of public support for random drug testing by focusing on the role of religion, specifically religious affiliation, in shaping public opinion. Analysis of survey data from a city in the Southwest identifies two separate dimensions of public support for random drug testing–a utilitarian dimension that is grounded in safety concerns, along with a normative dimension that reflects conservative moral beliefs, including a concern with the “evil” of drugs. Evidence from the data also indicates that conservative Protestants, compared to liberal-moderate Protestants, Catholics, and those with no affiliation, display higher levels of normative-based support for random drug testing. Researchers are encouraged to further explore the role of religion in shaping public support for the development of drug policies and other more general social control policies.     

The Effects of Religious Fundamentalism and Religiosity on Preference for Traditional Family Norms*

This study examines the effects of religion on preference for a patriarchal family, one in which the husband makes decisions while the wife is subservient to him. The effects of both religious fundamentalism and personal religiosity are considered using a survey of adults in a Southwestern city. The analysis reveals a strong positive direct effect of adherence to a fundamentalist doctrine on support for the patriarchal family, but no direct effect of personal religiosity. An interaction effect of these two variables, reported in some other studies of the effect of religion on other family issues, is not found. The effect of religious fundamentalism is equal in magnitude to the effect of age, and greater than the effects of education, gender, family income, head of household occupational prestige, subjective class identification, race and rural background. With the exceptions of age and gender, religious fundamentalism serves as a crucial intervening variable in the relationships between these variables and endorsement of patriarchal norms in the husband-wife relationship.     

Gender roles and social control

Drawing upon social control theory in criminology, this paper examines the relationship between gender roles and the inhibitors of deviance. We develop and test hypotheses that “traditional” females, defined in terms of either position in the social structure or gender‐role attitudes, perceive higher levels of three types of sanctions assocíated with crime than do males; while “nontraditional” females are similar to males in their perceptions of sanctions. Results indicate that while changing gender roles and gender‐role attitudes affect perceived threats of guilt‐feelings and social stigma, they do not appear to influence women's perceptions of legal sanctions.     

Childrearing,Self‐Control,and Crime: Additional Evidence*

Gottfredson and Hirschi's model of caregiving to produce high self‐control is examined using survey data from a city population of adults. The data permit assessment of the predictive ability of all three elements of the regimen, separately and in com‐bination. While a combination of the elements of the specified model and some of the individual components prove to be statistically significant predictors of self‐control, the coefficients are only modest ones. In addition, the sequential model of crime production set forth by the theorists proves to be questionable. These findings add to an emerging body of research suggesting that self‐control may be dependent on things other than the childhood caregiving regimen identified in self‐control theory.     

"RENDER UNTO CAESAR WHAT IS CAESAR'S":

Previous research on the relationship between religiosity and involvement in illegal behavior overlooks Hirschi and Stark's original concern with religion as a sanctioning system. While Hirschi and Stark proposed that religion affects compliance with the law by promising heaven and threatening damnation, this study suggests that its sanctions are self-imposed shame and socially-imposed embarrassment. Shame and embarrassment are compatible with a rational choice perspective on illegal behavior—they lower the expected utility of crime and, thus, its likelihood. These two threats stem from two conceptually distinct dimensions of religiosity. People strongly self-identified as religious are more likely to feel ashamed if they violate the law; those involved in a social network based on religion are more likely to be embarrassed. An adult sample's responses to a question concerning the likelihood of cheating on income taxes in the future tests these hypotheses. The threat of shame emanating from religious identity salience is a stronger deterrent than that of embarrassment.     

Deterrence and the Morally Committed*

The deterrence literature suggests that perceptions of the threat of legal sanctions influence the extent of involvement in illegal behavior only among those individuals who have not internalized legal norms. Individuals who are morally committed to a norm will not violate it, regardless of their perceptions of the certainty and severity of legal sanctions. We argue that this hypothesis relegates coercion to a position of secondary importance in a theory of social control; and we offer a rationale for an alternative hypothesis that perceived sanction threat has a deterrent effect at all levels of moral commitment. Our analysis, using refined measures of the variables which have emerged in recent research, supports our alternative hypothesis.     

The Occupational Prestige Structure: a Multidimensional Scaling Approach

Occupational prestige scores are one of the more frequently used variables in sociological research. However, the methods which have been employed in the past to obtain such scores are based on the implicit assumption that the occupational prestige structure is unidimensional. The technique of smallest space analysis, which makes no assumption about dimensionality, suggests that this previous assumption has produced a somewhat inaccurate picture of the occupational prestige structure.